This disclosure relates in general to techniques for accelerating the delivery and rendering of web files over the Internet.
Webpage designers continue to add increasingly more data to web files. A web file contains instructions for displaying a webpage. Where it was once common for a webpage to have only a few images, it is now common to find webpages with more than a dozen images. Additionally, more webpage designers are using higher-level programming languages. When web files are written in a higher-level programming language, the web file is often written not as efficiently as it could be.
For handling web files that are often data intensive, webpage hosts are turning to Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) to fulfill end-user requests for webpages. A CDN is one or more servers that receive requests from end users and respond to the requests. But adding an additional server between an origin server and the end user can potentially introduce a delay in the delivery and rendering of a web file.
Sometimes a CDN will introduce an instance-specific web file based on an origin web file. For an instance-specific web file, an initial response is added as a new section to the origin web file. The instance-specific web file would then have its own Uniform Resource Locator (URL). But introducing a new URL can break the browser history. Additionally, copying or forwarding the URL to the instance-specific web file can result in a broken link and a web browser not being able to render the origin web file to display a corresponding webpage.